Avoid Data Overload and Find Your Sweet Spot with BI

June 28, 2017

Tracking performance is key to improvement, whether you’re in marketing, sales, customer support, finance, or professional sports. Each team in your organization relies on different metrics fueled by different data to track progress and perform better. Collecting and sorting all that data and then finding the best way to present it can be a chore and a half without the right tools.

A business intelligence (BI) solution is the most effective way to make sense of and leverage all your company data to promote growth.

Dashboard reporting can transform your business

85% of business leaders believe data will transform the way they do business. You probably use Excel to understand company data and for reporting. And why wouldn’t you? It’s been the go-to reporting method for decades. Excel has some good capabilities, but it’s not the best option to track business performance. What if you could produce reports in a fraction of the time and with a fraction of the effort? You can with a BI solution.

Outdated reporting processeslike Excel are a major drain on company time and resources. A BI solution connects to your apps, databases, CRMs, financials, spreadsheets, and more, retrieving data from each of them. The result: an automated reporting process that presents results on real-time dashboards.

Dashboards simplify data mashups and visualization, drastically freeing up time and resources. These benefits, along with the others BI dashboards offer, allow you to transform your business by:

See consumers better with BI

The clearer you see your consumers, the easier it is to reach them. PayPal Co-Founder Max Levchin pointed out, “The world is now awash in data and we can see consumers in a lot clearer ways.” The data you need to help you understand and reach your consumers is out there. However, it can be easy to get lost in data if you don’t have the right tools to help you understand it. Of all the tools out there, a BI solution is the best way to access and interpret consumer data so you can leverage it for higher sales.

Escape slow reporting with BI

Like other smart business leaders, you’re probably measuring company performance. You know that what gets measured gets managed. Come reporting time, you’re pulling and sifting data from Google Analytics, Adwords, Quickbooks, Facebook, Instagram, MailChimp, Amazon Seller Central, or other sources. You’re eager to see what your reports will say about what your team has accomplished in the latest reporting cycle. Should you continue on your current course? Or are adjustments needed?

It takes hours to create your first report. Unfortunately, it’s incomplete. So you continue wrestling reports out of your data for a better picture of company performance.

An hour or two later, you have a better report. But you realize it will require sorting through a mountain of data each time you need a new report. Welcome, to the land of data overload. You’re not the first business leader to arrive and won’t be the last. Luckily, you can escape with the help of a BI solution. Here’s how.

Track KPIs to avoid data overload

Part of avoiding data overload is knowing which metrics to measure, track, and work to improve. That’s why it’s important to know the difference between metrics and KPIs. KPIs are your game-changing data. You need to identify them, track their performance on BI dashboards, and constantly work to improve them. If your KPIs aren’t performing well, your business won’t be either.

Figuring out and tracking your KPIs is your company’s data sweet spot. Doing so will help you make the most of your data and not be overwhelmed by it.

BI saves time and improves efficiency

RainCheck, an Australia-based company founded in 2014, lets users save items they find online and get notified when they’re nearby a store that stocks them. RainCheck used Grow to:

Make sense of mountains of data

Increase work efficiency

Better understand important trends and results

Improve decision making

RainCheck has over 500 different retailers and more than 10,000 individual stores connected to their platform. Before Grow, every day of operation created an avalanche of data with no effective way to make sense of it. “We’ve never had a problem generating data, however, presenting that data in a visually meaningful way to ourselves and to our clients was a challenge,” said RainCheck CEO Cameron Wall. Wall realized they needed a BI solution.

“We tried a few other platforms before we found Grow,” said Wall. “Grow immediately increased work efficiency and saved us a lot of work compared to a chart or graph we could try to build in Excel or another data software service.” That’s not the only way Grow helped RainCheck. “Grow has helped us in many ways,” said Wall. “By visualizing data in Grow, we, along with our clients, can better understand important trends and results, and that’s quite useful in decision making.”

Is your BI strategy working as wells as RainCheck’s, or could it use an upgrade? Learn how a business intelligence solution like Grow can help you get to the next level by requesting a demo today.